Lublin

by Manya Wilkinson

Overview

Winner of the Wingate Literary Prize

Winner of the 2025 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award 

Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada

Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913505943
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker who has lived in the North of England for over twenty years. Formerly a senior MA lecturer on prose and scriptwriting at Newcastle University, she is currently teaching prose workshops for Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Mslexia magazine. Her first novel, Ocean Avenue, was published by Serpent’s Tail, and her short stories by Comma Press. Her radio dramas have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century, and Woman’s Hour.

Editorial Reviews

"Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin is marvellously impossible to categorise. At once personal and epic, on the surface it is a tale of three young friends setting off on an adventure. In a scant 200 pages it creates a portrait of the joys and costs of friendship, while also providing an effortless discourse on the history of Europe and European Jewry — one that also looks compellingly towards the future. Wilkinson’s language and imagery call up that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem, Sam Beckett and Franz Kafka, yet it remains absolutely unique. This is a novel to press into the hands of strangers and exclaim, Read this book!"—Wingate Literary Prize Judges

“With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages [...] Lublin is more cogent and unflinching in its exploration of Jewish experience than Gyorgy Spiro’s sprawling historical novel Captivity, and also more moving than Cormac McCarthy’s alpha-male dystopia The Road in its rendering of ordinary human relationships pressured by imminent ruin.”—Randy Boyagoda, New York Times

“The best novel I read this year was Lublin by Manya Wilkinson. Part picaresque, part boys’ adventure story, part Freud’s joke book, part immersive dive into early-20th-century Jewish life in a Polish corner of the Russian empire, this funny and devastating novel is lucid, beautiful and utterly original. Where has this author been hiding all these years?” —Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2024

“Elya is determined to make it to Lublin no matter the cost. His dark jokes provide some of the novel’s most powerful moments. Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers’ ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust [...] A tale that uses humor to counterbalance tragedy asks if it’s too late to go back home.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Lublin is a mini masterpiece: simple, straightforward, narratologically complex, funny, sad and profoundly satisfying. If you read a finer novel this year—honestly, seriously?—well, lucky you.” —Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

“Often very funny, this is an original, compelling work of fiction.” —Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

“A masterful book.” —Claire Allfree, The Telegraph

“A delicious little book.” —Jenni Frazer, Jewish Chronicle

“Lublin has a truly individual flavour. Beautifully written, well-paced, rhythmical, sad, funny. It was a real pleasure to read it.” —David Almond

“Glorious [. . .] a novel for the ages by an absolutely spectacular writer.” —Simon Schama

“Wilkinson is a superb comic writer. She’s also gifted in startling poetic compression, turning on a sixpence to move into moments of horror and prophecy. Reading Lublin, you have to laugh; you want to look away from what follows, but you can’t.” —Sean O'Brien

“Mercurial, hilarious, terrifying, a sustained song to the lost, Lublin is a masterpiece. Prepare to be enchanted.” —Sinéad Morrissey

“Manya Wilkinson dips into both the present and future, blending adventure with historical fiction to create a sharp, unique tale.” —Zuzanna Lachendro, New Statesman

“A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.” Preti Taneja

Praise for Manya Wilkinson’s Ocean Avenue

“With a wry wit that recalls Woody Allen, Wilkinson confidently and evocatively blends the historical and personal into a disturbing yet funny tale.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2024-01-20
A journey through a disintegrating Poland in the years before the Holocaust.

Wilkinson’s characters start with an apparently simple goal: Three young Jewish friends, Elya Grynberg, Ziv Nagelbach, and Kiva Goldfarb, depart from Mezritsh, their small Polish village, for the market town of Lublin, where they will sell brushes for the village’s wealthy manufacturer, Kiva’s Uncle Velvel. Their journey has a fairy-tale-like quality; villages with names like Prune Town and Village of Lakes dot the way—until they don’t anymore, and the boys find themselves lost in a landscape haunted by abandoned villages and roving bands of Cossacks. In this new world, the bonds of trust among the friends start to unravel, but Elya is determined to make it to Lublin no matter the cost. His dark jokes provide some of the novel’s most powerful moments: “A young lad…who perished in the Odessa pogrom, goes up to Gan Eden where he meets Adoshem and tells him a vitz. Not just any vitz. A pogrom vitz. But Adoshem is not amused. ‘That’s not funny,’ Adoshem says. ‘I guess you had to be there,’ replies the lad.” Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers’ ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust. As the boys’ journey stretches on in the novel’s present, however, they can only intuit the sorrows to come. What they don’t know is that, even as they walk on, home has already changed.

A tale that uses humor to counterbalance tragedy asks if it’s too late to go back home.

Kirkus Reviews